Much Ado About Nothing

I listened to the BBC radio production of this, starring David Tennant as Benedick and Samantha Spiro as Beatrice.

Soooo. The one thing that kinda sucks about Much Ado is that I absorbed Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version so completely - it is so baked into my cells now - that I cannot NOT hear Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Robert Sean Leonard, Denzel Washington, and even KEANU in these roles. I realize, also, now, that the reason the 1993 movie version is so baked into my DNA is that that movie is like the Platonic ideal of a Shakespearean adaptation: it's peak Branagh, peak Emma Thompson, peak Tuscany, PEAK ALL OF THEM. They are perfect. And so every other version feels like they're just doing sad/not-so-good impressions of Them. Even David Tennant and his adorable Scottish accent is still like, “ya well Ken is so good tho” OH IDEA HOW ABOUT A SLASH FIC VERSION OF TWO BENEDICKS: KENNETH AND DAVID - WE CAN CALL IT “MUCH ADO ABOUT NOSLASH” Oooh that'd be good.

Anyway, compare:
- David Tennant and Catherine Tate - such a great duo, both of them so good too, in this scene: “Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?”
- Now compare the 1993 version of the same scene
I mean, it's like, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are good - great, even - but Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are PERFECT. They are the Platonic ideal of PERFECT SHAKESPEARE. And this BBC radio version, alas, does not have Catherine Tate. So it's just - okay-to-good.

Anyway, this all reminded me of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, which I read in high school and deeply informed my understanding of this play, namely:
- That Benedick and Beatrice are actually old flames: Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice... etc etc
- That “nothing” was pronounced “no” “thing” and was slang for vagina!?
- That this play is about marital realism and how Benedick and Beatrice won't live “happily ever after”, but that's fine.